Many persons in the present day are ready enough (as well they may be,) to become eloquent on the trivial absurdities and vulgar (too often dark and obscene) contrivances of the Witchcraft of the seventeenth century. Be it so. But perhaps, after all, the system as then worked was both skilfully, intellectually, and well enough adapted for the purposes and aims which its author had in hand. If the coarse-minded and uneducated of those days so readily became its agents and workers, coarseness and ignorance were reasonably and suitably, and perhaps of necessity, used in its operations. Now, however, the persistent Enemy of mankind, “the Old Serpent,”[107] appears to have adopted quite another course of tactics, less coarse it may be, and less revolting (in some particulars) to the sentimental and shallow, but equally efficacious for his diabolical purposes and eventual success. Where Witchcraft was formerly practised by ten persons, its new and more attractive phase, it is to be feared, is now accepted by thousands. All this, and more, may be gathered later on, when the subject of “Modern Spiritualism” is duly considered.
DREAMS, OMENS, WARNINGS, PRESENTIMENTS,
AND SECOND SIGHT.
“And how will those modern wits, of which our age is so full, account for this, who allow no God or Providence, no invisible world, no angelic kind and waking spirits, who, by a secret correspondence with our embodied spirits, give merciful hints to us of approaching mischief and impending dangers; and that timely, so as to put the means into our hands to avoid and escape them?”—History and Reality of Apparitions, by Andrew Moreton, Esq., p. 218. London: 1735.
“The Soul’s dark cottage, batter’d and decay’d,
Lets in new light through chinks which Time hath made.”
Edmund Waller.